Recommended battery size for Pimoroni Pico LiPo 2 XL W

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1

Hi,
my first post, so apologies if this is the wrong topic/forum.

I was just wondering what sort of lifetime the various battery sizes for the Pimoroni Pico LiPo 2 XL W yield? Do you by any chance have a table somewhere? You offer everything from 150 mAh up to 13.4Ah but I can’t find information about typical or max. current draw for the board.

Thank you for any help,
David

2

Current depends on what you do and on the voltage. With 5V the Pico will draw less current than with 3.6V. In idle mode and at 5V, you can expect something like 18mA to 60mA (the latter figure is when the RM2 is intialized and on).

Maybe you can describe your use case, because then it is much easier to recommend something.

BTW: For typical/max current draw you can probably use the figures you have in the (normal) Pico datasheets. My experience is that the versions of Pimoroni are not so much different - at least they don’t have a measurable effect compared to other factors.

3

Thank you @bablokb. Your Pico figures match approx. what the datasheet shows but the board itself will also draw some current.

I don’t really have a use case but would like to try out the Pico. I would want whatever I do to have battery during the day at least - I can then put it on charge at night.

Taking your figures, a 600mAh battery would last most of the day; 1360mAh between 9 and 10 days.

4

“The board”: the Pico is also a board. It has a regulator and this is one source of additional current which adds up with the RP2xxx. The regulator on the Pimoroni boards is slightly more efficient, but it needs LiPo level and does not run down to 1.8V as the Pico regulator.

But I would not worry about what the board uses. The main sink is the the RP2xxx itself and what you do with it. I am using for example a 150mA LiPo in a small logic analyzer based on the Pico-W and that is sufficient for a lengthy session. But I also use 2 AA batteries for environmental monitoring in Africa, and the batteries will last many months due to all the optimizations in hardware and especially software I did.

The best thing is to turn off the Pico or at least use deep-sleep if you have idle phases. This will greatly improve the runtime.

5

Ah. Just saw you quoted idle current, which obviously isn’t what I need, really.

6

Thank you very much for your real-life examples - that certainly helps.